THE BRANDENBURG state government is in crisis after the revelation that three MPs were one-time informers for the East German secret police, the Stasi.
Two officials have apologised and resigned immediately while a third is refusing to stand down, causing uproar in the Potsdam state parliament or Landtag.
The scandal threatens state governor Matthias Platzeck, a leading Social Democrat (SPD), and the controversial coalition he formed with the Left Party after elections in September. “These revelations are part of a painful but necessary process,” he said yesterday.
Mr Platzeck had hoped his “red-red” Potsdam coalition would help pave the way for future co-operation between the SPD and the Left Party at federal level in Berlin. But his experiment has gone awry, forcing an emergency debate on the Stasi scandal for Friday.
The Left Party, successor to East Germany’s ruling SED, does not shut out former Stasi informers from its ranks but insists they admit any links. The party’s leader in Brandenburg, Kerstin Kaiser, has admitted spying on former classmates in university. She informed her Stasi handlers which fellow students were watching forbidden West German television.
The three MPs at the centre of the current scandal had hidden their past; they included a vice-president of the Landtag, or state parliament, who spied on SED-critical officials in a Brandenburg local government in 1988.
In total, six of the Left Party’s 26-head Landtag fraction have pasts as Stasi informers.
Yesterday, the first signs emerged that SPD’s patience with the Left Party’s Stasi ballast was beginning to run out.
Of particular concern is the case of Gerd-Rüdiger Hoffman: despite claims he was a Stasi informer, the Left Party cultural secretary has refused to resign, asking for time to read his Stasi file.
“We expect that he clears this up quickly and admits his past in the GDR,” said Dietmar Woidke, SPD parliamentary leader in Potsdam.
“You just have to say yes or no, not say you have to go off and read your own file.”
The developments in Potsdam have worried Stasi experts and critics who warn of increasing influence of former secret police officials in German public life.
“It’s time that the SPD ends this foolishness,” said Hubertus Knabe, a leading Stasi expert. “The Left Party in Brandenburg is not suitable as a government partner because it never cut ties with its cadre of Stasi officials.”